Daily News | Sixers could soon be bringing back the black jerseys that started a ‘revolution’ 25 years ago
Pat Croce wasn’t just building a basketball team when he became 76ers president in 1996. He was leading a revolution.The Sixers — owners of five straight losing seasons — were drifting toward irrelevance.
Almost every NBA team received a face-lift in the 1990s as O’Grady and his team redesigned logos and uniforms to keep up with the exploding merchandise market. Former NBA commissioner David Stern told the designers to stay away from the classic looks of the Celtics, Bulls, and Knicks, but everyone else was fair game.
“We had to show the fans of Philadelphia and the NBA that this was going to be a team to reckon with,” Croce said. “He was super hands on. ‘I feel great.’ Pat was definitely cut from a different cloth from a lot of the owners we would deal with,” O’Grady said. “Sometimes, I would never meet the owners. Like it would be like, ‘This is going up to Paul Allen,’ but Paul Allen was like this Vulcan and you’d never see the guy.